by Chuck Sharman

A February 2026 review by PLN of mail policies at 250 of the largest U.S. jail systems, which together hold over half the country’s detainees, reveals that almost 62% have instituted policies banning physical mail, except for legal mail. The findings indicate that jails are well along a road already traveled by state and federal prison systems, over 78% of which have banned direct delivery of non-legal “general” mail, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Feb. 2025, p.1.]

This development represents a sea-change in the way people communicate with the outside world while incarcerated. And the rush of private firms into this space makes clear that it is a money-grab for them, one that is licensed by sheriffs to perform nothing more than a mail delivery function they were already paying for with the tax-supported U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

Worse still, the new services are much slower. At a typical jail that bans physical mail, letters and other items are forwarded to a service center in another state, where they are scanned into a digital file that is emailed for delivery either via electronic tablet or a paper printout. On top of that delay, the copy is also frequently of poor quality. Moreover, the benefit of physically touching a card or letter made by a loved one is lost—somtimes at great cost to a detainee’s mental and emotional well-being, psychologists warn.

Guards must still review the digital file for violations of content rules—those that prohibit pornography or communication related to gang or criminal activity. Jailers must also take time to ensure that the digital file is emailed to the correct detainee, or that a physical copy is printed and delivered to them. The only thing that they don’t need to do is examine the copy for evidence of drugs. But it isn’t at all clear how much time that was adding to the other inspection procedures that remain in place.

It is in the name of combating contraband drugs that this shift away from physical mail is usually made—even though a review of federal sentences found that guards smuggle at least 20% of contraband drugs, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Mar. 2026, p.44.] While the pace of digitization has increased, banning physical mail is an extension of jail policies that began to proliferate over a decade ago, limiting detainees to receiving nothing but postcards.

In fact, one head-scratching finding of PLN’s investigation was that at least three large jail systems—in Arizona’s Pima County, Georgia’s Gwinnett County and Florida’s Manatee County—have maintained a postcard-only policy for detainee general mail even after switching to a mail scanning service. So anyone writing to detainees in these lockups must still limit the correspondence to postcards, which are then scanned and delivered electronically.

How the Research Was Conducted

Using the most recent population reports available, PLN identified 250 of the largest jail systems across the country. There was no jail large enough to make the list in four states with small populations: Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. Also excluded were five states where pretrial detainees are held in lockups overseen by the state prison system; results from these states—Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Rhode Island and Vermont—were already included in PLN’s earlier report on mail digitization at prisons.

Looking at the municipalities where these 250 jail systems operate, the list includes all of the country’s most populous counties, with a few exceptions. In Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and Oakland County, Michigan, for example, efforts to blunt the effect of an inability to afford bail have cut detainee populations enough to drop the jail system off the list of the 250 largest—even though they are the twentieth and thirty-third largest counties in the U.S., respectively. Conversely, some counties with small populations made the list because of large jail populations, likely swollen by detainees held for civil immigration violations for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

That group includes inordinately large jail systems in 15 smaller counties in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana; each held over 500 detainees despite having a total county population under 100,000. By way of comparison, the rate for the U.S. as a whole is about 541 per 100,000; in Japan, it’s just 33.

This is the result of a mass incarceration in which personnel and policies are deployed to repeatedly sweep for legal violations. As the Mercatus Center at Virginia’s George Mason University notes, the federal criminal code has grown to 1,510 sections containing at least 5,199 crimes, representing a list of activities so broad “that every American unknowingly commits three felonies a day.” And that’s just under federal law. See: Counting the Code: How Many Criminal Laws Has Congress Created? Mercatus Center at Geo. Mason Univ. (Jan. 2023).

Intercepting the Mail

As with the earlier PLN report on prisons, research for this report distinguished between “screening” mail and “scanning” it. The former is performed in every jail, looking for evidence of contraband. In most of the 250 largest jail systems, PLN confirmed that those using staff to screen mail had them physically open each envelope to inspect its contents. They were looking for drugs, of course, but also cash, money orders or personal checks, which are also forbidden. Cellphones and cellphone accessories, like batteries and chargers were also targeted. Other items considered contraband included anything that might be used as a weapon, like a paper clip; any images or text that might be considered pornographic, as well as some devices; and anything that might threaten other detainees or staff, including their images and personal identifying information. Digitizing the mail lifts just part of this burden from guards, who must still conduct a lengthy inspection for pornography, threats, and incitements to violence.

After a letter is opened and its contents inspected for contraband, the “screening” process is complete. In the jails holding about 38% of all detainees, that was the end, and the screened original mail was handed directly to the recipient. In the other 62% of jails where mail digitization has been adopted, a complete screening triggers the “scanning” process—during which the letter and any allowed mailpieces are passed through a machine that makes an electronic copy. Some jails exempt photos from this step and allow detainees to receive the original prints; others apply the same rules to items like newspaper and magazine clippings, flyers, reports, and financial spreadsheets or will deliver a color copy of such items but only black-and-white printouts of any letters. In jails with a third-party vendor providing mail scanning, senders can opt to use it just for pictures, which are often culled during the screening process. Regardless, the size and quantity of mailpieces is strictly limited.

Jails rarely return anything seized during this process to the sender. Depending on what turns up, jailers may cite incarcerated recipients for committing a disciplinary infraction after evidence of contraband is found in their mail. If a guard pulls a selfie from a prisoner’s partner for what they subjectively view as too revealing, you may get a write-up for violating rules banning overtly sexual content. In some jails, there is a legal way to get around this: administrators offer to let images be sent electronically to detainees—for a fee, of course.

Anything delivered electronically must be read on a kiosk or tablet, but usage of these devices is frequently limited. In some jails, detainees are forced to share a device. If it’s a kiosk located outside of cells, usage can be blocked during a lockdown or other movement restriction. Even inside of cells, requiring detainees to use a shared kiosk or tablet invites conflicts, with gangs frequently stepping in to mediate usage disputes. Use of a kiosk or tablet may also be limited by a disciplinary sanction.

One of the biggest problems with mail digitization occurs when the jail changes tablet providers. Content that a detainee bought from the original vendor probably won’t migrate from the old tablet after it’s turned in. Saved content—including letters and pictures—may also be lost. If the original letter was not destroyed, there’s a chance of restoring what was lost. But policies vary widely. In Texas’ massive Harris County jail system, the 8,480 detainees getting digitized copies of their mail on a tablet provided by Securus Technologies have 30 days before the original is destroyed. In the Bexar County jail system 200 miles away, guards perform the mail scanning and throw away the original letters after just two days.

Prohibited Items and
Other Usage Rules

Bexar County runs one of nine large jail systems that PLN identified in which guards scan detainees’ “general mail.” Presumably, they are also screening the originals for contraband at the same time. In Richland County, South Carolina, the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center uses a “MailSecur” machine sold by Massachusetts-based RaySecur, to scan detainee mail for contraband using the same “T-Ray” technology employed at airports.

The Bexar County Jail has a list of prohibited items that includes food and “combs, jewelry, bookmarks, cigarettes, stickers, greeting cards with ribbon/glitter/string/beads,” along with any other items “deemed inappropriate.” A single letter may contain up to six photos, provided that they are no larger than 4”x6” and show no nudity whatsoever. “Photos with hand gang signs and/or gestures, weapons, drugs, and or drug paraphernalia” will also be rejected. Guards will confiscate “cash, money orders, cashier’s checks”; “credit cards, phone cards, driver’s licenses, photo IDs”; and original “birth certificates, marriage certificates, social security cards, car titles, etc.”

Musical greeting cards are banned. So are “hard plastic items or cardboard items.” No “art supplies” will survive screening, “including writing instruments, watercolors, paint, colored pencils, etc.” The list of banned items also covers “torn-out pages from any books or magazines,” as well as “maps, calendars, mail-order catalogs, sketchbooks, journals, and posters.” Detainees may not receive “hardback, leather-bound, or spiral-bound books.” Nor can they get a book that wasn’t sent by the publisher or a “well-established” retailer like Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million. Amazon books must be delivered by USPS, FedEx or UPS.

In other lockups, rules governing detainee mail run a confusing gamut of options. Only white envelopes are usually allowed, which cuts out many greeting cards. But greeting cards are also not allowed, out of fear that drugs can be hidden in the art and illustrations. Many jails also specify that white paper must be used for all letters. But in the San Bernardino County jails northeast of Los Angeles, letters must be written on lined paper. Those with lipstick “kiss” impressions will also be rejected, the jail website promises.

Cash, checks and money orders are not considered contraband in the San Diego County jails. They are also permitted by the Los Angeles County jails, but only until the detainee’s trust account reaches $300; at that point, access to more cash, checks, and money orders is suspended. It also may be hard for detainees to write back, since sending writing materials—blank pages, envelopes and stamps—is prohibited. Conveniently, those items are all for sale in the jail commissary, often at inflated prices.

In most jails using guards to screen mail, senders are advised to expect a delay of at least two days after it arrives at the lockup. In Chicago’s Cook County Jail, there is no vendor providing mail digitization services, but detainee mail may still be digitized and emailed by senders using an approved third-party service called LiamSafe. A flyer posted on the jail website says that the service charges 60 cents for a letter and 99 cents for a photo, which speeds the content past guard screening and onto the detainee’s tablet. The service also appears as an option on the website of the jail in Suffolk County, New York. The nearby Westchester County Jail offers a similar service that it runs in-house.

In those jails where private vendors hold a contract to create digital copies of detainee mail for electronic delivery, it will come as no surprise that the same vendor usually offers a faster, better-quality alternative, for a fee. Under the premium option, an e-message can be quickly delivered that is crisp, clear, and stored on the detainee’s tablet to re-read at leisure. The disincentive that this creates to improve the basic service is especially galling considering that the entire scheme is most often run at no charge to the lockup because all the money is earned from fees charged to the friends and family members of those incarcerated there—a group of families already disproportionately afflicted with high poverty rates, as noted by researcher Brianna Borrelli. See: “The Interplay of Mass Incarceration and Poverty,” Georgetown Journal on Poverty & Law Policy (Winter 2023).

Legal Mail Sparks Challenge to Digitization

No jail allows detainees to correspond with other detainees or prisoners. Wisconsin prisoners Armin Wand III and Marcellous Walker sued TextBehind, the mail digitization vendor for the state Department of Corrections (DOC), claiming that their First Amendment rights were violated when the firm refused to process and destroyed their communication with one another regarding a legal matter.

TextBehind “inadvertently” collected legal mail during the first three months after it began providing mail digitization for the DOC in November 2021. The firm claimed that it returned flagged items to the sender until February 2022, after which it forwarded them to the prison where the addressee was confined. After screening the prisoners’ complaint, the district court dismissed claims against the DOC and its officials. But the claims against TextBehind were allowed to proceed.

However, the prisoners immediately ran into a logistical hurdle because they were then housed in separate units, making it nearly impossible for them both to sign every case filing, as required by Fed. Rule of Civil Procedure 11(a). The prisoners were offered the chance to sever their claims, but when they tried to do so seven months later, after they were moved to separate prisons, the district court said it was “too late”; predictably, the prisoners failed to timely respond to TextBehind’s summary judgment motion, and their case was dismissed.

Turning to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, they argued against denial of the motion to sever. But the Court refused to find error in that, agreeing with the district court “that it would be highly prejudicial to TextBehind [to] delay resolution of the case.” The two continued to object to TextBehind’s protestations that it “never” destroyed their legal mail. But because they had not had the chance to jointly sign a motion in opposition before the district court ruled, no error was found either in the grant of summary judgment, and the appeal was dismissed on January 27, 2025. A rehearing before the full Seventh Circuit en banc was denied on March 12, 2025. See: Wand v. TextBehind, 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 1783 (7th Cir.); and 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 5788 (7th Cir.).

Legal Mail Follows Different Processes

The TextBehind case points out a weakness in agreements with private digitization service vendors, who are left to police themselves under rules that exempt legal mail. These include a requirement that the item is sent directly to the jail where a detainee is held. Another requirement is that guards—not the vendor—open the legal mail to scan it for contraband before delivery. Usually, this is done in the presence of the detainee it is addressed to, so that they can observe and make sure that contents aren’t read, which could interfere with the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

This is also done in the nine lockups where staffers scan detainee general mail. In three other systems, legal mail addressed to detainees is opened in their presence and then scanned, too; they get copies, and the original documents are shredded. Two of the three systems are Florida jails that have run into legal trouble with their mail policies.

As PLN reported, the Santa Rosa County Jail was an early adopter of a postcard-only policy for detainee mail. After it was implemented, detainees filed a challenge in federal court, which was settled in 2012 with an agreement to abandon the policy. [See: PLN, Nov. 2012, p.32.] Another suit challenged legal mail procedures in the Polk County Jail; guards scanned legal mail and destroyed the originals before handing it to detainee Ricky Christmas, but the scanning machine kept a digital copy that he said violated his civil rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed that he had a point when it revived his suit in November 2023. [See: PLN, Mar. 2024, p.55.]

The third system using guards to scan legal mail is Oklahoma’s Tulsa County Jail, which is perhaps understandably skittish, after it was found liable for a detainee’s fatal heart attack; the 2023 verdict awarding her estate $82 million was called “the largest standing civil rights death claim verdict in U.S. history,” as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2023, p.51.]

Still another method for handling legal mail has been implemented at the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh. Staffers there screen both general and legal mail before handing detainees the originals. But attorneys can expedite the process for their legal mail by applying for a unique control number, which speeds their mail through screening. This is not optional but required at the jail in Martin County, Florida; however, the control number is a QRcode, which comes not from the sheriff’s office but from the jail’s mail digitization vendor, TextBehind.

A more common approach is the one used at the Douglas County Jail in Omaha, Nebraska. There, attorneys may also send detainees documents in envelopes that are opened in their presence, while guards search for contraband. Or, for a fee, those attorneys may use the jail’s private mail scanning firm, Smart Communications, to send digital copies of legal documents directly to the detainee’s tablet. This option is found in nearly every large jail in which a private vendor holds a contract to scan detainee mail. Since the prisoner will end up benefitting, the cost is passed on with other legal fees.

This is just one way that mail-digitization schemes take advantage of prisoners and detainees; instead of making these firms more accountable to the people using their services, the various types of contracts serve only to make them less so, by incentivizing them to do such a poor job that detainees and their associates will buy higher-priced offerings.

Profiteers Involved: TextBehind

Whenever a government fills a trough with public money, private companies swoop in, and these various mail digitization schemes are no exception. PLN’s research found that in 250 of the largest U.S. jail systems, the competition for these public dollars is fierce, so far failing to produce any clear “winner” among at least 10 firms jockeying for market share. None of the other nine companies has currently surpassed the relatively low 16.8% market share achieved by TextBehind.

Founded in Maryland in 2012 by Zia Rana, a Pakistani immigrant with experience doing technology work for the U.N. and the Pentagon, according to the company website, it holds contracts with large jail systems confining over 57,000 detainees, PLN found. A flattering 2015 profile in Forbes credited Rana for scoring state economic development funds to create the scanning system, which lets prisoners and detainees respond to correspondents with electronic messages for “the cost of … a postage stamp.” Many client jails claim that the charge to detainees is currently nothing. Of course, the real money comes from senders, who pay up to $1.49 for each 5,000-character message (about 750 words), plus 49 cents for each photo or attachment.

TextBehind apparently got a huge boost in late 2023, when it entered into a little-reported agreement with ViaPath Technologies, formerly known as Global*Tel Link or GTL. According to a Medium article by North Carolina prisoner journalist Damien Delune, the state Department of Adult Correction (DAC) was set to cancel its contract with TextBehind, which at the time sent digitized mail to state prisons for printout on machines it provided, after which a copy was delivered to prisoners. But apparently even that much guard involvement was too much for the short-staffed DAC. At the last minute, however, the TextBehind contract was renewed. As it turned out, the company had entered into an agreement allowing its digitized mail copies to bypass printing and be delivered directly on prisoner tablets provided by ViaPath.

The website of the jail system in McClennan County, Texas, confirms that TextBehind mail copies are delivered on ViaPath “Getting Out” tablets. The address of TextBehind’s Maryland processing center appears under the ViaPath letterhead on the site for Michigan’s Genesee County Jail. A phone number for staff support is ViaPath’s, too, the same that appears on the site for another TextBehind client, Virginia’s New River Valley Regional Jail. The site for Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County Prison spells out that its “third-party mail vendor” is ViaPath, directing mail to be sent to the address of TextBehind’s processing center. Flyers directing mail to the same address but under ViaPath’s “Getting Out” brand appear on the sites of both Virginia’s Rappahannock Regional Jail and Georgia’s DeKalb County Jail.

The benefit of this arrangement for ViaPath is clear, driving ever more correspondents to its fee-based instant messaging service. For TextBehind, it helps avoid another close call like the one in North Carolina. For those incarcerated, like Delune, it means that getting printouts of photos and other attachments, which used to be provided for free on TextBehind printers, now requires paying a fee to ViaPath. “Letters from home, no matter how they arrive, are one of the few bastions of hope when someone is in prison,” he wrote. “And they’ve managed to fuck that up for us again.”

Profiteers Involved: Smart Communications

Holding second place in the mail digitization market is Florida-based Smart Communications, Inc., with contracts to serve nearly 50,000 detainees, representing 14.7% of those held in large jails. Its 2025 revenues were estimated at $70 million, in state court filings related to a messy ownership dispute between founder and former state prisoner Jon Logan and his mother, Janice Logan. As PLN reported, that appeared to drive the firm into bankruptcy court in late 2024. [See: PLN, June 2025, p.30.] But the bankruptcy case was dismissed three months later, when the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of Florida agreed with Janice Logan that it was not the proper forum to resolve the ownership dispute. See: In re Smart Communications Holding, Inc., USBC (M.D. Fla.), Case No. 8:24-07106.

The bankruptcy case further revealed that Smart had trouble with its tablet vendor, Connect Solutions, which provided detainees and prisoners with devices that were not “corrections grade” and easily dismantled to create weapons. As PLN also reported, the firm earlier lost a bid to enforce a patent on its MailGuard service, when the firm’s service—copying mail sent to detainees and prisoners and forwarding the copies to their jail or prison—was deemed not “patent-eligible” by the U.S. District Court for both the Middle District of Pennsylvania, in April 2022, and the Middle District of Tennessee, in October 2022. The Pennsylvania case was filed against TextBehind after it secured the contract that Smart had held with the York County Prison. But Logan was outfoxed by then-Warden Clair Doll, who secured indemnification in the suit from ViaPath, then GTL, in exchange for its lucrative phone and e-messaging business. [See: PLN, June 2023, p.31.]

Smart has since developed its own e-messaging business. SmartInmate competes directly with ViaPath’s “Getting Out” instant messaging service, allowing customers to “correspond every day in near real-time instant communication,” according to the website for one client, the jail system in Dallas County, Texas. It’s a little cumbersome, requiring photos and other attachments to be sent separately for copying and delivery. But the company’s MailGuard tracker allows senders to find out where their mail is in the process, also alerting them when it has been rejected and why.

Of course, these systems aren’t really designed for the benefit of the people who use them to communicate with one another. They are implemented by sheriffs who want to prove they’re doing something about contraband—even if those benefits are illusory. They are provided by firms unscrupulous enough to attach a financial albatross to some of the poorest people in the country, sucking out what little money they have. They also provide the government with a massive and permanent database of digitized private communication, which can be searched almost instantly for any given name, place, or date. Given that nearly one-third of adult Americans have been arrested and subject to incarceration, this puts them all at risk of a level of intrusion that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.

Other Profiteers Involved

Because the market for mail digitization is so new, it has yet to experience significant consolidation, leaving at least eight smaller players competing with the two current market leaders. One of these eight, Texas-based Securus Technologies, is far from a small firm, controlling 21.3% of the market for mail scanning in state and federal prisons. It also provides calling services to prisons and jails, combining with ViaPath to control over 80% of the prison telecom market.

Through its JPay subsidiary, Securus additionally provides email and e-messaging to a large share of prisons and jails—putting it in line to benefit when people get fed up with slow, poor-quality scans of their correspondence with incarcerated loved ones. The firm holds contracts with jails holding about 11.5% of those in the 250 largest U.S. jail systems, PLN found.

Arkansas-based JailATM holds a 5.7% share. It also provides money services to the incarcerated. Las Vegas-based Pigeonly holds a 3.7% market share in large jails, augmenting its 2.2% share of the prison market. Like Smart Communications before its ViaPath agreement, the firm began by providing photocopies of mail but has struggled to compete with companies that can also deliver electronic copies to an incarcerated person’s tablet.

Another Texas-based telecom, NCIC Holdings, has contracts serving 1.4% of the detainees held by the largest jails, and Kentucky-based Combined Public Communications holds another 1.4% share. Utah-based Jailhouse Mail LLC, which holds the contract for the San Diego County jail system and its 3,782 detainees, has a market share of 1.1%, even though none of the other jails among the largest 250 in the U.S. reported using its service.

A much smaller competitor in the telecom market, North Carolina-based Paytel Communications, holds an even smaller 0.7% market share. The smallest player, Louisiana-based City TeleCoin, holds a 0.5% share.

Looking Forward

Like officials in state and the federal prison systems, sheriffs running U.S. jails face several competing demands when it comes to detainee mail. Detainees and their correspondents would like their privacy rights to be respected. After all, the vast majority of those held in jail are awaiting trial—meaning they have not been convicted of the crimes they have been charged with and thus retain all of their civil rights.

But most sheriffs hold elected positions, putting them under constituent pressure to “solve” the problem of contraband cellphones and drugs—and a mail digitization scheme proves to many that an effort is being made. The pressure also drives extension of these schemes to legal mail, with the jeopardy that threatens civil rights. Yet evidence of the effectiveness of these measures is so far mixed at best; five years after the Pennsylvania DOC adopted mail digitization, as PLN reported, the number of drug overdoses was higher than before. [See: PLN, Sep. 2023, p.35.]

In unions representing guards, leaders were the first to call for stopping incoming mail to combat contraband drugs suspected of causing several guard deaths over the past six years. They also wanted body scanners for prisoners. But in New York, those same leaders have balked at subjecting their union guards to the scans, according to a December 2025 report by the New York Focus—even as some visitors were turned away because the technology was unable to distinguish a tampon from contraband, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Feb. 2026, p.46.]

On the other side of the equation, the voices of detainees and their allies hardly sound as loud—until one mounts a legal challenge to any aspect of these surveillance measures, costing municipal leaders hefty legal fees.

The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), PLN’s nonprofit publisher, has consistently opposed mail scanning, filing a federal lawsuit against the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) in October 2024 when HRDC publications got snagged in its scheme. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico dismissed Management & Training Corp. as a Defendant on January 21, 2026, finding that its contract to run the Otero County Prison Facility for NMCD did not extend the necessary personal jurisdiction. The case remains pending against NMCD and its employees, and PLN will continue to update developments. See: Hum. Rts. Def Ctr. v. Grisham, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11798 (D.N.M.).

Meanwhile, as mail digitization schemes continue their inexorable creep across the American carceral landscape, the surveillance state proliferates, and profiteering by state-favored firms marches on. It is important for prisoners and detainees to familiarize themselves with the details of their lockup’s particular scheme, in order to minimize the amount of their private information that is exposed and protect precious originals from permanent loss.  

Additional sources: Forbes, Medium, New York Focus

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